Is it a Donut 🍩 — or just the hole from one?

Once or twice a year, if you stay long enough in climate and battery scale-ups, you encounter a technology that politely asks you to forget thermodynamics, manufacturing constraints, and twenty years of painful industrial learning.

Like a lot of other things, this year’s entry arrived early.

The battery world is currently excited about Donut Lab solid state battery.

Let’s outline the plausible range of outcomes:

1 Worst case: it’s a scam. Svolt has already called it out (you’ll understand why if you read to the end of this post).

2 Best case: it’s not really a solid-state battery in the way the industry understands that term. After reading Michael Sura’s exceptional technology deep dive, a far more charitable interpretation is that we’re looking at something closer to a supercapacitor bolted onto a conventional lithium-ion system.

Now, to understand Donut Labs from a non-technology perspective, let’s have a brief look at credibility signals — always a useful exercise when physics seems unusually cooperative.

Founder profile.


The headline combines electric mobility and AI. Historically, people who put AI in their LinkedIn bio tend to have strong opinions about geopolitics, repost Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and explain the future of humanity better than Foreign Policy. Building and operating battery factories is, understandably, a relatively easy exercise.

Time allocation.


The founder is listed as active in thirteen organisations, as founder or advisor, including the Forbes Technology Council. This suggests exceptional time-management skills (hustle culture!) and that gigafactory execution has become remarkably asynchronous.

Team composition.


One engineer. 
Which makes sense. After the collapse of Northvolt, hiring large engineering teams is clearly overrated. Manufacturing can always be outsourced to a photovoltaic lab. Or a university cleanroom. Or optimism.

Hype level.


Impressive. No notes here.

To be clear: this is not an attack. On the contrary, I am genuinely proud that Europe finally produced a battery startup that promises zero Chinese dependency, perfect performance, and effortless manufacturability — all at once.

The battery exists, for now, primarily on a website, in press releases and in a motorcycle. But if I knew how to ride a motorcycle, I would probably pre-order one immediately.

Progress requires belief.

Happy Friday!